Potential Major Change To WWE NXT After CW Network Deal

WWE

A potential major change that could be coming to WWE NXT after the announcement of its deal with the CW Network has emerged.

The deal was revealed on November 7, with TKO stating in its earnings call that day that it’s resulted in a 70% increase in the rights fees for the show.

Given that increase, it has now been reported that there’s been talk of WWE of using the extra money to move NXT out of the WWE Performance Center – where it takes place every week – and take it on tour.

Addressing the possibility of NXT on tour on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer said:

“There’s talk about taking them touring with the extra money. There’s pluses and minuses of it.

“The pluses are, if it looks good and it looks better, we’ve seen with Raw, we’ve seen with everyone, that when it looks good on TV, the look of the TV show is very, very important when it comes to viewership. So moving to bigger places will help to a degree.

“But the developmental aspect of the thing – if you are taking the people out of town, with the travel days and everything like that, it does give them less days in the gym, and it does take a lot of the people who work with the talent away for a couple of days.

“So there is a negativity towards… unless they do arenas in Florida, but the problem with doing arenas in Florida is there’s only so many before you burn out the audience. Especially in that area.

“It would help the show, it would help the numbers for them to move to a bigger setting. They’d sell more tickets, things like that, bring in revenue in that way – I don’t know if they’d sell enough tickets to offset the expense of going, but they might.

“All of this remains to be seen, but with the new money, it’s more affordable to do that. It was definitely something that’s been talked about though as far as moving tapings out of the Performance Center.”

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WWE NXT is currently aired on the USA Network with that deal ending in October 2024 when the move to the CW Network will be made.

This week’s episode of NXT on the USA Network drew 794,000 viewers and 0.26 in the 18-49 demo.

That was without any big main roster names like Becky Lynch or Dominik Mysterio/Rhea Ripley being on the show.

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